80sNostalgia

Purple People Eater

This was a game in which you had to remove little plastic people from the mouth of a gelatinous purple people eater. It worked in much the same way as Operation, in that you used metal pliers to extract people from the monsters metal-lined mouth.

In a way this is most 80s boys dream, getting gory with a pet monster. As well as playing it the traditional way and extracting the small plastic people one by one, I also spent a good few hours slowly feeding it the same people I had saved. I suppose it was a weird thing to do, but I though of it as payback. I’d saved them all and not a single one of them had thanked me, so they all had to systematically die one by one. In retrospect this will have been because their mouths were plastic, so my actions may have been deemed a little harsh.

If the prongs touched the metal monster mouth, the buzz the monster gave off really was quite substantial. I remember I had this and played it quite a bit, but after a few days it was decided by my parents that it should be kept at my grandads house, due to the fact that after playing it for extended periods of time it gave me really bad nightmares.

So just to recap, my parents, upon noticing that I was no longer sleeping peacefully at night, decided to NOT throw it away completely, but just control my access to it. Sort of in a “break him in gently” tactic in the same way doctors introduce therapy. All that happened was that I no longer feared going to bed at night, but feared going to Grandads instead.

Come to think of it I had this toy at my Grandads, along with Jaws and the Dusty Bin game. I wish I still had them. They were some ace games.